Vanessa Elisa Grotti is a Wellcome Trust Research Fellow at the Wellcome Unit for the History of Medicine, Oxford University. Vanessa is a social and medical anthropologist with field experience in South America and primarily interested in the history of contact, sedentarisation and change among native Amazonian populations, with a special focus on the body, personhood and wellbeing. She has been working in Suriname, French Guiana and Brazil for over a decade, in remote indigenous communities as well as in urban institutional contexts, especially in secular and religious hospital environments. She has published on a range of topics covering shamanism, conversion to Christianity, trade and objects, primary healthcare, extractive industries, migration and human security. Vanessa's current project, funded by the Wellcome Trust, is a comparative history of Protestant and Catholic medical missions among the Trio (Tiriyó) in Suriname and Brazil (1959-1994). She has also recently begun working on minorities, migration and reproductive healthcare in borderlands, in particular on Europe's remote peripheries through a small research project funded by the John Fell OUP Fund on maternity care, migration and healthcare policy among tribal and indigenous women in Suriname and French Guiana.
Keywords: Social and Medical Anthropology, Amazonia, Indigenous and Tribal People, Healthcare and welfare across borders, Rainforest borders, Migration, Suriname, French Guiana, Brazil
vanessa.grotti@wuhmo.ox.ac.uk
Back to Register